#3. the wpa spent money on the arts. full
#3. the wpa spent money on the arts. professional

The only guidance the government offered about subject matter was that the 'American scene' would be a suitable topic. 'But at the time it was a revelation to many people in America that the country even had artists in it.'Īnd not only artists, but things for them to paint. 'The art they produced was rather conservative, and it wouldn't be looked at by most critics today,' says Francis O'Connor, a New York City-based scholar and author of the 1969 book Federal Suppport for the Visual Arts. 'They did their best work for the nation,' Broun says, and then they disappeared below the national horizon to the realm of regional or local artist. Some, it appears, would be almost completely unknown today if the Smithsonian, in the 1960s, hadn't received the surviving PWAP artworks from government agencies that had displayed them. The great majority of them were younger than 40 when they enrolled, by which time most artists have either made their reputation or switched to another line of work.

#3. the wpa spent money on the arts. full

Instead, 'the show is full of names we scarcely recognize today,' says Elizabeth Broun, the museum's director. The PWAP's approach of advertising for artists might not have identified the most stellar candidates. It was not the PWAP but its better-known successor, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), that helped support the likes of young Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock before they became luminaries.

#3. the wpa spent money on the arts. professional

People lined up in the cold outside government offices to apply, says George Gurney, deputy chief curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where an exhibition of PWAP art is on display until January 3: 'They had to prove they were professional artists, they had to pass a needs test, and then they were put into categories-Level One Artist, Level Two or Laborer-that determined their salaries.' Artists were recruited through newspaper advertisements placed around the country the whole program was up and running in a couple of weeks. The premise of the PWAP was that artists should be held to the same standards of production and public value as workers wielding shovels in the national parks. The bureacracy may not have been watching too closely what the artists painted, but it certainly was counting how much and what they were paid: a total of $1,184,000, an average of $75.59 per artwork, pretty good value even then. Thus was born the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which in roughly the first four months of 1934 hired 3,749 artists and produced 15,663 paintings, murals, prints, crafts and sculptures for government buildings around the country. Roosevelt put in charge of work relief, settled the matter, saying, 'Hell, they've got to eat just like other people!' But Harry Hopkins, whom President Franklin D. It wasn't an obvious thing to do by definition artists had no 'jobs' to lose. As the Federal Emergency Relief Act, a prototype of the New Deal work-relief programs, began to put a few dollars into the pockets of hungry workers, the question arose whether to include artists among the beneficiaries. Unemployment was close to 25 percent and even the weather conspired to inflict misery: February was the coldest month on record in the Northeast. In early 1934, the United States was near the depths of what we hope will not go down in history as the First Great Depression.